Earlier in the week, reports emerged that worldwide only nine percent of plastic waste gets recycled, with the rate for the United States now five

Polluting plastics, carbon, cancers: the painful results of recycling plastic

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2023-06-03 08:00:04

Earlier in the week, reports emerged that worldwide only nine percent of plastic waste gets recycled, with the rate for the United States now five percent, as facilities for plastic sorting have microplastics of five millimeters sloughing into plant waste waters.

In a Greenpeace report, only five percent of plastic waste gets recycled into new products, with no plastic waste meeting the threshold to be called recyclable according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative, which stipulated that plastic waste should have a recycling capacity of 30 percent.

In still another report, only about five percent of plastic waste got recycled in the United States in 2021, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when millions of tonnes of plastic waste sent to China got counted as recycled.

In other words, only a few percentage of plastic waste gets recycled worldwide, and this causes alarm, with the global plastic waste set to almost triple by 2060, around half ending up in landfills and less than a fifth recycled, with almost two-third of the waste from short-lived items such as packaging, low-cost products, and textile.